6 Ways to Make Your One-on-One Meetings More Meaningful

It can be easy for 1:1 meetings to start feeling shallow and formulaic, even though neither side wants them to be that way. 

We’ve heard this from both sides.  

Managers want their team members to be more engaged and bring substantive topics to discuss.  Team members wish their managers would take more interest in their careers. 

In short, everyone wants a more meaningful conversation.  But it’s not clear on how to get there.

But rather than looking for the answer in another article on ‘how to have better 1:1s’, what if we broadened out the topic to just work out how to have better conversations full stop.  

Lucy Foulkes is a psychologist and lecturer at University College London and her recent piece for Psyche magazine on ‘How to have more meaningful conversations’ really resonates in the context as a manager.

Foulkes identifies six ways to make your conversations more meaningful:

• Recognise small talk as a necessary first step: we get it, small talk can feel artificial and sometimes performative, but there’s a reason the bedrock of some entire cultures is discussing the weather (ahem, Britain).  It helps set the scene and establish rapport before you tackle weightier topics.  Try not to skip it too quickly. 

• Ask better questions: asking thoughtful questions demonstrates you’re not just interested in topics you’ve introduced, but what matters to the other person.  These don’t have to be original questions, often it means just going deeper on the existing discussion, with phrases like ‘What was that like?’, ‘Why did you feel that was important?’, ‘How did that make you feel?’.  Want some more evidence? A 2017 Harvard study found that people who ask questions tend to be better liked by their conversation partners.
  

• Listen to the answers: Stephen Covey captured the problem many of us have with listening - ‘Most of us don’t listen with the intent to understand. We listen with the intent to reply.’  It can be a tough habit to break but Foulkes notes that trying to be motivated by curiosity rather than debate might be a good place to start.
  

• Be willing to share something about yourself: we have consistently seen manager-team member relationships improve when managers are willing to share too.  This reciprocity encourages team members to open up more.  If this feels daunting, you don’t have to share your life story right away.  It can be something small.  But the act of sharing will encourage your counterpart to share too.
  

• Come ready to learn: there is always something new to learn from a 1:1 meeting.  Many of the points above (better listening and questioning) stem from approaching 1:1s in this mindset.  If you approach a 1:1 as routine or even worse, a chore, then you’re not going to get the most out of it, and your team member will feel it immediately.
  

• Be prepared to give and take: you and the other party should consider abiding by a simple rule: ‘I will give you the space to speak, and I will properly listen to what you have to say’.